U.S. neocons ok with unending, unwinnable wars

Colonel Andrew Bacevich, in a recent article for TomDispatch, said the U.S. military is committed to a never-ending war whose aim is no longer victory, but to avoid admitting defeat.

Some generals have even stated publicly that they don’t foresee a time when the “war on terror” will ever come to an end.

That’s not their fault, Bacevich wrote. Everything humanly possible to achieve victory in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria short of genocide has been tried by the U.S. military and failed. But so long as American forces remain in those countries, American neoconservatives can say the United States has not been defeated.

Bacevich pointed to the First World War, when it soon should have become obvious that continuing the war was more harmful to all participants than any gain that any of them could have hoped to achieve through victory. Yet no head of state except Lenin in Russia could think of anything to do except fight on until the end.

This was the great nightmare of H.G. Wells, in The War in the Air and The Shape of Things to Come—that a future world war would be impossible to stop until there was a complete breakdown of governmental authority and social order.

We in the USA are a long way from that. The only consequences of “defeat” would be giving up the false dream of world empire.

But there may come a time when the nations our government is trying to conquer and dominate will combine and give us Americans a taste of our own medicine. If and when that happens, all our choices will be bad.